Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
7 The cooling Earth
The twenty-first of September 1792 was a momentous day in Paris.
King Louis XVI was deposed and the Republic was inaugurated. Four
months later, on 21 January 1793, he lost his head on the Place de
Louis Quinze (now the Place de la Concorde) to the newly introduced
machine of death, the guillotine - first used in France in April 1792 -
and at much the same time the trappings of royalty were dismantled.
The royal garden in Paris, the Jardin du Roi, was renamed Jardin des
Plantes. This gardenwas and remains one of themajor botanic gardens
of the world. It had been laid out in 1626 by Guy de la Brosse and Jean
H´ roard for Louis XIII, and specialised in medicinal plants - not
unusual at the time, when plants were often used in traditional herbal
medicine, and when the botanists and medics were always on the look
out for new varieties and species which could provide different cures
and remedies. The gardens, which now cover 28 hectares, were opened
to the general public in 1650, and around them developed a number of
institutions which now house the Mus
´
um National d'Histoire
Naturelle. Into this museum were brought numbers of exotic species
of plants and animals, rocks and minerals collected from the far-flung
corners of the French empire that stretched from the east to Louisiana
in North America. Following the Revolution the King's own mena-
gerie was removed from Versailles and the animals were transported
to the site. In 1870, during the disastrous six-month siege of Paris by
the Prussian army, the city folk were forced to eat many of the wild
animals. Apparently the elephants were a bit chewy but roast bear was
considered good.
The museum quarter in Paris is criss-crossed with streets bear-
ing the names of scientists, zoologists, botanists and anatomists
familiar to historians of science. Today the Jardin des Plantes is
